


Daemon and Taboo

by Sean_deBergerac



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Crossover, Gen, Psychoanalysis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 18:06:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sean_deBergerac/pseuds/Sean_deBergerac
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Shortly after the events of the HDM trilogy, analytical psychotheologist Sigmund Freud explains his findings on the unconscious roots of the connection between man and daemon and the Leda Complex that lies at the root of the taboo against contact with the daemon of the Other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Daemon and Taboo

I 

In recent years the foundations of the Church, and indeed the entire edifice of experimental theology they support, have suffered two great blows. My close friend and erstwhile colleague, the late Lord Asriel, dealt the first when he proved the existence of other worlds and thereby confirmed the long-dismissed Barnard-Stokes Heresy. If I did not find such metaphors the stuff of those thinkers whose ideas can not stand without the crutch of spectacle, I would stress the aptness of the single stroke with which he tore a hole through our physical and intellectual horizons. Any theological system whose goal was the justification of our own experience became instantly obsolete. Belief in the platitude that we live in the best of all possible worlds is limitless egotism when we are surrounded by worlds that seem at the very least no worse than our own. More importantly, the Church lost its its claim to infallibility in questions that defy empirical proof. A heresy, broadly speaking, is a hypothesis about an unanswerable question that runs counter to doctrine. When one heresy becomes undeniable, this entire dogma is instantly suspect.   
It was therefore a great surprise that the second blow to ecclesiastical authority was no heresy, but the clear confirmation of one of the Church’s most fundamental tenets. The chance discovery of the world of the dead during Asriel’s war gave them the afterlife they had always believed in, but also proved the axiom that faith is strongest when it needs no evidence. Millions of believers finally caught a glimpse of the promised end, and found it more horrible than infinite non-existence. No heavenly choirs awaited them, no eternal presence of their divine; merely a bleak despair leading to merciful Lethe. In the wake of this shock, many cynics were led to proclaim the death of God, mourning his assassination by rebel forces. This is overhasty, for the dogma is quite clear that if God were no longer to exist, the world would in that instant cease ever to have existed. Not to mention that the apparent age of this Hades world - at least as old as our own - seems rather to suggest that it is also a part of God’s ineffable plan, about which we apparently know less than we even suspected. Experimental theology must take new prominence in the light of this discovery, providing the frameworks around which older theologies will align themselves, instead of the reverse.  
I write this paper today as a first step in a new theological project, one that goes further than even Asriel could have predicted. For these two great disturbances - the loss of paradise and of our uniqueness in the universe - were merely preludes to a third: the psychotheological unity of man and daemon. This conclusion may not immediately seem groundbreaking, as it is abundantly clear that each individual (in our world, at least) is composed of two bodies, but the relationship between these entities has never been adequately investigated. Our folk-wisdom, in accord with the old Achaian philosophers, postulates a duality of mind. While we are intimately connected to our daemons, both by the demands of proximity and by attunement to their emotions, they nonetheless possess will and desires of their own. Who did not, as a small child, find themselves held back from the most exciting roof-top explorations by a play partner who adamantly refused to take a winged form and join in the perilous fun? Even as we grow and our companions take the shapes that best suit us and themselves, we still sometimes find ourselves at odds with them. A patient told me once with great regret how his relationship with a willing young woman of good family was broken off because her daemon could not overcome his aversion to the young man’s beloved thrush. Such occurrences are obviously not as common as the agreement between man and daemon, those two partners who have been molded since birth by each other’s presence, but they speak to a measure of mutual independence.  
This individuality is, however, no more than an illusion perpetuated by heretofore insufficiently precise analysis. Through my long occupation with neurotic patients, it has become clear that the bond between human and daemon goes deeper than mere empathy, and rather than as bearers of individual consciousness, we must see their personality as constituted by and constituting our own, with the gap between the two minds bridged by a mass of unconscious desire. The depth of this connection has previously gone unnoticed because it is precisely designed to be invisible when healthy. We do not need a doctor to inspect our lungs until breathing becomes difficult. In our day-to-day affairs, our relationships to our daemons seem so natural and function so comfortably that we take them for granted, neglecting to ask ourselves by what force exactly we should be able to receive their emotions at a distance, or how we always know what they want. Because normal cases prove so fruitless, it is necessary to examine pathological cases to prove our point. I will begin by providing examples from my own clinical practice with neurotic patients, and examine their similarity to that bogeyman of our age, now proved all too real: the victim of incision.

II

It is a commonplace in psychotheological circles that the observation of a patient’s daemon gives acute insight into emotional states that they may be reticent to discuss. My dear Gradiva tends to curl up on the arm of my chair during our sessions and let her tail drop into my lap when she notices any unusual reaction: two pairs of eyes for two sets of symptoms. She points out a swallow fluttering frantically against a windowpane when the conversation touches on fear of social failure or a cat preening in response to compliments that were accepted with apparent self-deprecation. All of this is natural enough, and well documented.   
Several years ago, work with a particular patient turned my attention to a different rapport between human and daemon, one which goes beyond emotions to encompass unarticulated thoughts and ideas1. A young lady was suffering from insomnia and outbreaks of hysteria following two offers of marriage which had come simultaneously and unexpectedly. The first was from a family friend who had known the young woman her entire life. The second came from a recent acquaintance, a gallant young janissary, the story of whose combat in Baluchistan had quite captivated the social circle in this young lady’s hometown. Her parents, acting with utmost modern restraint, made it known that while marriage is an act that can lead either to a lifetime of comfortable prosperity or of miserable itinerancy, they would not compel her to decide either way.  
As the young woman explained this dilemma in one of our first sessions, it became clear that a strong desire for one of the men must be at the root of her sleep disturbances and other symptoms. She professed herself completely unsure of what she ought do, and asserted that she no longer knew which of the suitors she preferred. Indeed, the very question made her anxious to the point of aphasia. We might have remained for some time at an impasse if Gradiva had not directed my attention to the lady’s daemon, a very energetic auburn-red squirrel. I had become used to his constant motion, his attention always divided between observing as much as my office as he tactfully could, harassing Gradiva, and comforting his sobbing partner. As we came to this question, however, he was still, watching her fretfully from a perch atop one of the books I had carelessly left lying on the side table. Noting this, I allowed the conversation to leave the dreaded subject and discussed other matters for the remainder of that session. The next time we met, I moved my books to an opposite table, but left the selection the same. Sure enough, when she lamented her inability to choose a bridegroom, he watched her from atop a book. The same one, as I eagerly observed.  
The book was Silas Marner. On the recommendation of a dear friend, master at a revered Oxford University college, since deceased, I had been revisiting the English novel of the last century. My patient had noticed this, and even professed experiencing a thrill, which she called childish, upon reading Jane Austen. (One must only think of her Jan-issary, whose martial charm could awaken any girlish feeling.) There were a number of Ms Austen’s books on the table and I remarked how curious it was that her daemon instead twice chose to rest upon the story of an older weaver who treasured a young woman more than all of his gold and used his wealth to create a good life for her. She seemed surprised, and her daemon also evinced shock, moving away from the book but regarding it with suspicion for long afterwards. I reminded her that her first suitor was a well-known businessman, one Mr Weber2, practically a Marner himself. After this revelation, she quickly, though not without some lingering reservation, admitted that she found the well-meaning family friend’s suite more appealing than the cavalier’s. They were married promptly thereafter.  
It is clear that in this case the young woman's daemon was responding to her attitude towards her dilemma, with even his unconscious actions commenting on her desires. What is striking is that it was more than simply her emotions that drove his reaction. It would be a truism, instructive for the doctor but not for the theologian, if at the moment where she showed herself most distressed he ran back and forth along the edge of her seat, unable to decide where to rest. Instead, he used his position, unaware to himself or to her, to indicate her preference. This suggests a connection that goes beyond mere emotional resonance into the unacknowledged desires that long to be fulfilled. We and our daemons share much more than the moods we are conscious of. An undercurrent of unconscious desire underlies our every interaction.  
My patient, caught between the promise of a settled and fruitful life with a man who cared for her dearly and the dream of a romance with a soldier who could have been the hero of one of her beloved English novels, could not reveal her true feelings to herself without betraying another desire. Her daemon, however, could be the externalization of the overwhelming desire and bring her to the choice she wanted to make. He could not, however, directly express this urge without being seen as merely another voice in her internal debate. Hence this process of displacement by which a weaver who cared for a young woman could stand in for the Weber whom she desired to see care for her. The literary trope of the rival suitors made the choice between two novels the perfect expression of her solution. Since that first observation of the relationship between daemonian actions and unfulfilled desires, I have collected many more, some of which were published (along with submissions from esteemed psychoanalysts throughout the Reich) in my treatise on the unconscious roots of psychotheological phenomena.

III

Having proven the existence of an articulate, unconscious connection between our daemons and ourselves (or, perhaps, the daemon and human sides of our self), analytical psychotheologists naturally became curious as to its extent. Where could this shared knowledge rest? If it were entirely within the human brain, daemons would be little more than projections of ourselves, not at all true partners in our lives. This conclusion seems intuitively monstrous, but without the opportunity to observe the opposite phenomenon, the dependence of humans on daemonian impulses, we were increasingly inclined to draw that conclusion. In recent years, however, we have heard reports of a phenomenon so terrible that one might be willing to sacrifice all hope of theological progress for the knowledge that it was still an   
old wives’ tale. Nonetheless, it is only meet that we honor the victims by using their sacrifice for the education of mankind. These poor souls of whom I speak are, of course, the so-called “severed children:” victims of incision.  
There have long been fairy stories and rumors of the existence of humans with no daemons, used by strained mothers to frighten children into good behavior - Slovenly Peter cuts off the thumbs of little boys who don’t eat their soup and daemons who go prying in the grownups’ things get lost and never return. How horrifying that this should be proved true and that those very adults who promised to protect our children should have committed the crime, sabotaging the reputation of experimental theology more than any heresy.   
Since the trauma of incision inevitably proves fatal within mere weeks, there are no survivors from the Bolvangar camps available for clinical observation. The apostate General Oblaton Board was too interested in natural theological questions such as the construction of the severing machine and its effect on Rusakov particles (the so-called “Dust”) to observe their victims’ psychic states, but even the fragmentary accounts brought back by those who liberated the camps is enlightening. The few severed children they encountered shared consistent symptoms, exemplified in the case of the boy we shall call Billy M3. This youth was discovered in a small village not far from the Bolvangar facility from which he had escaped. He died soon thereafter, another victim of heretical experimentation. Reports from the rescue party and from the few townspeople who dared interact with the boy stress his disorientation and memory loss, inability to discuss his ordeal, and his obsessive replacement of his separated daemon, Mouser3, with a frozen herring.  
These general symptoms are shared by sufferers of trauma of all sorts. Physical wounds may seem to heal, but leave patients with scars, limps, and other handicaps if inexpertly treated. Considering the regrettably unsystematic state of modern psychotheological medicine, it is only to be expected that psychic and emotional ruptures are so frequently improperly healed and lead to unexpected effects. The difference in this case is one of intensity. A typical traumatic incident, if such a thing exists, is expelled from conscious memory to avoid constant contact with the metaphorical “open wound.” This creates a tension that must be resolved and which expresses itself through the creation of symptoms that reenact the original incident or its trigger. A young man whose daemon was inappropriately caressed by a family friend finds himself in later years pulling out his hair in moments of distraction and pressure, attempting to remove the beautiful pelt that was once a temptation.   
For Billy M, however, there is no longer a subconscious to which this trauma can be displaced, as the repository of the forgotten was cleft away when the bond between boy and daemon was severed. The memory simply disappears, along with all manner of empathy and perceptive acuity, traits that also derive from, or reside in, the psychic connection between the human and daemonian halves of the individual. What is left is a being, half of whose consciousness has been removed along with his physical other half. The whole had been greater than the sum of its visible parts. Now it is an unstable shell, unable to process new experience without the mass of unconscious memories that normally provide their framework. Out of an innate instinct, or perhaps because even in the mind nature abhors a vacuum, the boy seizes on a new daemon whose presence can calm the pain of a shattered identity. It is no coincidence that the frozen fish should be his choice, a once living creature whose decay and dissolution is slowed but not stopped by the harsh environment into which it is thrust. The daemon contains not merely a part of our identity, but the foundations of our selves entire. The boy Billy M died upon separation from Mouser; the remainder of his existence was a tragic pantomime, the delayed onset of rigor mortis. 

IV  
Having used the most unfortunate examples to prove the importance of the daemon for our mental function, it remains to be shown how our own universal experience confirms this theory. We have already alluded to the common childhood game of stretching the physical separation between daemon and child to its utmost, relenting only when the pressure becomes too strong and rejoicing in the reunion. This is no mere diversion, but a serious test of the limits of the young self, while the developing body and the still changeable daemon come to realize themselves. Just as many young children escape society’s restrictions by playing at tartars and templars before they fully adjust to those norms, boys and girls try to flee their daemon before they learn that it is an inextricable part of them. These games almost always cease long before the child’s daemon settles. The in-between time is a reconciliation to the presence of the daemon and a working through of its significance.  
This process of coming to understand oneself through proximity to the daemon gives insight into a rarely discussed psychotheological phenomenon, but one whose importance as a motivator in both personal and social spheres can not be overlooked. It is not my desire to offend my readers for the sake of mere shock, but I firmly believe that those areas which our every impulse cries out against examining are precisely where the most fundamental forces of our nature lay hidden. To that end, I must speak frankly about a subject that even I would much rather leave in peace. If there is one taboo that we find in every society, more widespread than our western disgust at cannibalism and provoking stronger reactions than Oedipus’s crime, it is that against even the slightest contact with the daemon of another. Even speaking to another man’s daemon, no matter how innocently, is a great faux-pas, and no one would admit even the temptation to touch a daemon other than our own.  
But this temptation must, it is clear, on some level exist. As a companion to Kant’s famous dictum that only that which can be done, ought to be, can we add that only that which we want to do must be forbidden us. The strength of the ban must also be proportional to the compulsion to violate it. If the anti-contact taboo provokes such strong aversions, that can only be because it would otherwise represent a great temptation. Since the thought of touching another’s daemon is met only with disgust in all children old enough to express themselves, the original desire must stem from even before speech.  
It must, indeed, find its root in the earliest days of infancy, long before the child crosses the threshold of language and prior to the earliest memories. In those times, a child neither recognizes itself in a mirror, nor does it recognize its daemon’s actions as reflecting on itself. Every mother has seen her babe begin to wail when his daemon inquired too closely into the nature of fire and singed a whisker. This never prevents the growing child from making the same discovery itself. At first, the link with the daemon is received as a series of sensations imposed from without, arbitrary and intrusive as sunlight in the morning or the taste of the mother’s milk. It is only between the sixth and eighteenth months of age that the infant finds itself able to unite its various sensations to form a real sense of itself. The strange baby in the mirror becomes me; the fantastic, playful creature whose every mood I can sense is my daemon   
This identification of the self and the daemon necessarily entails the realisation of the separation from others. The first casualty of this psychic intercision, if the accuracy of the metaphor excuses its grisly resonance, is the mother. As the child recognises itself it begins to see that the mother, whose role as nourisher and comforter had been the focal point of its disconnected experiences, is an individual in her own right. It feels itself shut out from her life. The eventual recognition of her daemon is the most painful banishment of all. The mother, who was once so close, has her own companion just as the child does, but one whose experience of the world is completely closed to it. If it could only form the same relationship with the mother’s daemon as it has with its own, their natal connection would be restored. It acquires a fierce obsession with the mother’s daemon. We could somewhat fancifully call this psychic moment the Leda Complex, after that queen of Sparta who sought union with the godhead through congress with his swan4.  
In itself, this complex is not sufficient to account for the taboo in question. If it were the only factor operating in such an occasion, the child would simply seize the mother’s daemon and realize in doing so that this does not re-establish the longed-for connection. This itself would a potentially crippling disappointment, but in practice, affairs never reach this point. There must therefore be a second motivation at work, an inhibition strong enough to force the repression of this desire. This can be none other than that most fundamental of all nature’s urges: the drive towards self-preservation. A justification of the importance of this primal psychic force is surely unnecessary, but it is important to recall that while all living matter has a basic tendency to sustain its own vitality, the human being is living matter endowed with a soul and the survival of his individual consciousness is as important to him as the continued existence of his body5. His immortal particularity is made incarnate in the relationship with his own daemon. In the strength and privacy of that bond, we have proof of our own individuality. To desire the daemon of another is to long for the cessation of our own existence, which the mind can not tolerate and remain healthy. As a preemptive balm against this trauma, the desire is forgotten, repressed, shoved into the depths of the unconscious. All that remains is the deep aversion to physical contact with the foreign daemon that prevents the urge from resurfacing and jeopardizing the unity of the identity. This act of repression coincides with the commencement of these separation-reunion6 games between daemon and child, which probe the physical limitations of this identity.  
In the vast majority of cases, this psychic defense measure is successful. The only damage is the aforementioned disgust at the thought of daemonian contact. In a not insignificant number of cases, however, the repression is not sufficiently strong. Later in life, the latent Leda complex manifests itself in neurotic symptoms such as suicidal thoughts and the intense, often erotic, fixation on the daemons of loved ones. Some sufferers create elaborate narratives, imagining who they might be if another person’s daemon become their own. The most extreme examples devise dozens of distinct personalities, and their daemons, even after many years in a fixed form, change shape to accompany these delusions, a retrogression that categorically proves the infantile root of the complex.

V  
Having demonstrated theoretically the existence of the Leda Complex, the third great blow to the Church’s epistemological authority, it is beyond the scope of this essay to recount the numerous case studies that led the psychotheological discipline to this discovery. For those skeptics who would like to examine its premises more closely, I can recommend my case study of a neurotic Muscovite nobleman, whom I call “the Wolfman” after a persistent dream in which the patient feels himself in the body of a vicious, white wolf. The realization that his mother, a domineering woman of true Cossack spirit who was his sole influence after the death of his father, is partnered with a snow-white arctic fox, provided the key to unravelling his symptoms. For those readers less inclined to peruse psychotheological literature, a brief example from a more familiar belleletristic source may suffice. It is not in vain that the poet is considered a prophet of the soul, and we have frequently noted his insight into psychic truths that are only now being formulated analytically. For the confirmation of our musings on the relationship between man and daemon and on the Leda complex, we need look no further than a poem of the Hibernian muse, Mr W.B. Yeats.  
In a potent sonnet that deserves to be ranked with those of Petrarca, Shakspeer, and the New Danish laureate Laurids Brigge, “Leda and the Swan,” the Celt depicts the most famous literary consummation of that fantasy which forms the basis of our psychic development. This seduction scene is familiar enough, but Yeats’ depiction echoes our own intuitions even in the smallest particulars. The imagery is sensuous, verging on the explicit, but we must be careful not to read base procreative desire in the tryst between male swan and human woman. The Leda Complex, while rooted in the libido, does not obey the same strict rules that fix our conjugal urges to members of the opposite sex. Its first target, you will remember, is always the mother, and in later life this desire can be displaced onto targets of either gender. In our current case, we see a relatively uncomplicated urge for return to the maternal bosom. In the moment of their rapture, “he holds her helpless breast upon his breast.” This attribution of dominance to the desired party is consistent among neurotics. Even in our everyday courtships, we perceive the object of our affection as an active partner. I could not help but love, we think, she would not have smiled so agreeably had she not wanted to entrap me. Those few patients who I have persuaded to discuss incidents with the daemons of others insist similarly that they were the objects of an assault, they they could not avoid their act.  
We subsequently see that this is no issue of mere bestial perversion, but a desire directed towards an intelligent being that resides within the targeted form. “How can body,” we are asked, “but feel the strange heart beating where it lies?” The creature is apparently animal, but its heart is not its own. The seat of its emotions and urges, the home of that sensation our poets call “love,” belongs to another whose presence transmutes a mere beast into a “feathered glory” which the “terrified vague fingers” can not repel. This is, of course, because Leda wants nothing more than to accept her godly lover. Only her fear of personal delimitation motivates this charade of resistance.   
This fear is justified. An apocalyptic premonition accompanies the impossible consummation of her desire, the “shudder in the loins.” The relationship between daemon and man is the seat of the unconscious, that maelstrom of desires and repressions that determines our behavior. The Greeks well knew that free will was no aegis against a maledict fate. They simply mislocated the source of the curse, as their idolatrous beliefs rebelled against the principles of modern theological experiment. Our destinies are not determined by Zeus’s caprice, but are entirely forged within our own unconscious. Leda’s union with the divine daemon engenders “the broken wall, the burning room and tower, and Agamemnon dead” insofar as it implies the assimilation of a new unconscious reservoir that will shape her own fate and those of her children.  
In the sonnet, it is unclear whether Leda is aware of this vision or if only we readers are privy to the knowledge of her future. This masterful ambiguity perfectly justifies the force of the taboo against human-daemonian contact. We all prize the illusion of our freedom, and become threatened and anxious when it is implied that our actions are not our own. We might paraphrase the poem’s final couplet and ask who would dare take on knowledge of our unconscious predestination with the pleasure of an urge satisfied before we drop from the indifferent beak of the other’s daemon? And who better to pose this question, we ask as a prelude to further discussion, than that romantic Celt whose heart so firmly belonged to Maud Gonne, a Hibernian muse whose daemon was a snow-white swan?

**Author's Note:**

> 1: An essay on this case, written by the author, appeared in the March 19- volume of the New Hapsburger Journal for Psycho-Theology. The present discussion is taken, with only minor expansions, from that article.
> 
> 2: German for Weaver. (Translator’s Note)
> 
> 3: A false name, the real identity hidden out of respect for the poor boy.
> 
> 4: (For what are myths of the theos zookephalos and of the god made beast but symbols of the unity of man and daemon?)
> 
> 5: More so, indeed. The church teaches that the body is mortal, and we now know that the spiritual side of man lives on in another universe after his death. While the body has a natural tendency towards death, there is no equivalent drive for the soul.
> 
> 6: A clumsy, but unavoidable, expansion of the original’s Teutonically succint “Fort/Da.”


End file.
